Briefs: Canberra insider

Few would fail to recognise the daunting reform task that faced
Andrew Metcalfe
when he became Immigration secretary after the Cornelia Rau scandal, or the day-to-day difficulties of the job. The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia this week named him Federal Government Leader of the Year, with $40,000 for a sabbatical to invest in leadership development. A $20,000 award in the second category went to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s Wendy Southern.

The Shiny Bum Singers took a break for the caretaker period but have a new bipartisan offering based on the old Bob Lind hit, Elusive Butterfly. Renamed Elusive Butterfly of Power, it starts: “You wake up post-election/To the sound of Independents moving past you in the wind/And if you’re quick enough to rise/You’ll catch the fleeting glimpse of someone’s fading shadow/Out there beyond the boondocks/You may see the floating motion of Akubras in the wings/ And if the sleep has left your ears/You might hear greenies running/through an open meadow."

The commonwealth auditor-general,
Ian McPhee,
paid a nice tribute to his predecessor, Pat Barrett, in a speech to the Risk Management Institute of Australia last Friday, saying Barrett had done more than anyone to put risk management on the public sector management agenda in the 1980s. “Pat strongly promoted the benefits of risk management to a population of public servants then used to working in a more rules-based world," Mr McPhee said.

Senior public service jobs are opening up now the caretaker period is over. As well as a new director-general of the National Library of Australia, there is a plum deputy secretary’s position going in the Attorney-General’s Department. There are also number of senior executive band two positions available, including at the A-G , Human Services, Customs and Centrelink.